Universal Pictures was looking at innovative ways to promote 50 Shades Darker and VP of marketing Leigh Godfrey lead the team behind the 360 video campaign that allowed viewers to become a part of the film, and experience a lavish 4-minute masquerade ball with their favourite couple. The reasons for choosing this was particularly to maximise engagement and connect with the audience creating a more involved experience for the movie going audience.

Why OmniVirt:

Once the campaign was conceptualised and created, Universal was looking for avenues beyond Facebook and YouTube to distribute the content and to maximise the reach of the campaign among the film’s target audience. Maxus Global, the agency behind the campaign used OmniVirt’s platform to seamlessly integrate the 360VR experience into their existing media plan. Keith Baker felt using OmniVirt to programmatically target the film’s specific audience across all platforms would gain the creative more visibility and they would be able to use OmniVirt’s analytics to measure the impact of the creative. The campaign launched across Conde Nast, Hearst Properties and even Snapchat.

Length of Campaign:

The campaign ran between the 6th to the 16th of February. The film released worldwide on the 14th of February, so as a run up to that, the campaign was executed to build awareness for the awareness and create a buzz for the movie.

The Results:

Through the course of the 10 day campaign, the video racked up close to 500,000 views , with Snapchat alone contributing almost 100,000 views! The total watch time for this 360 video was close to 13,000 hours which is a whopping number considering that 360 videos campaigns are still at a nascent stage. The average viewer on made it to about 60% of the video depending on the placement, which is considerably higher than the industry standard of 50% for video marketing consumption.

And compared to a test campaign we saw a 10x increase in CTR, which means the engagement was considerably higher than expected.

The success of such a campaign is evidence to the fact that more and more people are looking for an immersive experience from brands and companies. In a medium like film, where the entire success of storytelling is directly proportional to how connected your audience feels, 360 Video VR campaigns can be a huge asset. If you have a similar campaign planned and want to reach to a wide network, feel free to contact Omnivirt for any assistance.